Deventer

In Deventer, the Netherlands, a routine real estate deal and demolition became the site of innovation and new intelligence in urban design. As architecture dissolves into the blurry middle ground between individual art practice and urban planning, the profession’s discourse is falling apart. We lack a vocabulary for this hugely important middle ground: projects that are neither local nor global, neither temporary nor permanent, neither original (in the protean sense) nor strictly an act of preservation. In the small Dutch city of Deventer, a pair of projects recently emerged that help map this middle ground: the creation and sale of an unusual development plan for a disused mid-twentieth-century hospital complex; and the transformation of a 1956 Catholic hospital monastery into a community health centre, the Jozef Health Centre Deventer. Deventer tells the story that drove these two projects to their chequered ends, and connects them to broader changes in the professions as a first step towards finding a vocabulary for the new scale of change in architecture.